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Dr. , a Research Fellow in Cyber Security and Ethics here in PAIS, has won the 2013 award in the Ethics category.

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Throughout her career, Dr Taddeo has focused on problems and topics which have great bearing on contemporary societies, such as the ethical issues raised by the emergence of new technologies, especially information and communication technologies (ICTs). Her approach to research rests on the firm idea that ICTs prompt a conceptual revolution that is changing the environment and the moral scenario in which human beings interact. In doing so, ICTs brings to the fore new moral issues, generating a vacuum that needs to be filled by conceptually-grounded policies; the latter cannot be properly addressed before the former issues are overcome. Dr Taddeo’s research has the twofold goal of contributing to the academic debate and of providing innovative analyses, which can then offer the conceptual ground for sound policies and regulations concerning the use of ICTs. This is the case for her work on peer-to-peer technologies, online trust, cyber warfare and cyber security.

Dr Taddeo is committed to establishing collaboration with scholars and experts from different fields, e.g. policy-makers, lawyers, military, and engineers, in order to develop interdisciplinary research and to ensure that the ethical issues related to ICTs are heard and taken into consideration beyond the boundaries of academia. In this respect, it is noteworthy that Dr Taddeo worked with Google Europe to organize a workshop on cyber security and civil rights and collaborates on regular basis with the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. In this case, her research was crucial to attracting and focusing the military’s and international lawyers’ attention on the ethical problems engendered by cyber warfare and on the policy vacuum that this phenomenon brought to the fore.